that is superficially the same sentence, but you've removed the key part. while "you only have to be worse than the best 5-10% to not be making money" is logically (in the truth table sense) the same as "you have to be in the top 5-10% to be making money", the implication of the former sentence is that it's surprisingly easy to fall out of the zone in which you are making money, whereas the implications of yours are that it's hard to enter that zone.
Yeah, I mean there are some terrible players out there. But most of the losing players at the high end would be winners at the low end. They're playing high because either they have money to blow (Tony Parker and Guy Laliberte come to mind) or because they usually play lower stakes but are taking a shot to move up.
It's also worth pointing out that the highest stakes tables have starting stacks in the 10s of thousands of dollars and pots in the hundreds of thousands. Your ROI doesn't have to be super high to pull in 4-figure hourly rates at those levels.
But for fun sometime, do a search for "Isildur1" in late 2009, early 2010.
